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This theme issue brings together researchers from diverse fields to assess the current status and future prospects of embodied cognition in the age of generative artificial intelligence. In this introduction, we first clarify our view of embodiment as a potentially unifying concept in the study of cognition, characterizing this as a perspective that questions mind–body dualism and recognizes a profound continuity between sensorimotor action in the world and more abstract forms of cognition. We then consider how this unifying concept is developed and elaborated by the other contributions to this issue, identifying the following two key themes: (i) the role of language in cognition and its entanglement with the body and (ii) bodily mechanisms of interpersonal perception and alignment across the domains of social affiliation, teaching and learning. On balance, we consider that embodied approaches to the study of cognition, culture and evolution remain promising, but will require greater integration across disciplines to fully realize their potential. We conclude by suggesting that researchers will need to be ready and able to meet the various methodological, theoretical and practical challenges this will entail and remain open to encountering markedly different viewpoints about how and why embodiment matters. This article is the part of this theme issue 'Minds in movement: embodied cognition in the age of artificial intelligence'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cultural reproduction of lithic technology, long an implicit assumption of archaeological theories, has garnered increasing attention over the past decades. Major debates ranging from the origins of the human culture capacity to the interpretation of spatiotemporal patterning now make explicit reference to social learning mechanisms and cultural evolutionary dynamics. This burgeoning literature has produced important insights and methodological innovations. However, this rapid growth has sometimes led to confusion and controversy due to an under‐examination of underlying theoretical and methodological assumptions. The time is thus ripe for a critical assessment of progress in the study of the cultural reproduction of lithic technology. Here we review recent work addressing the evolutionary origins of human culture and the meaning of artifact variation at both intrasite and intersite levels. We propose that further progress will require a more extended and context‐specific evolutionary approach to address the complexity of real‐world cultural reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stone tools provide key evidence of human cognitive evolution but remain challenging to interpret. Stone tool skill-learning has been understudied even though (1) the most salient cognitive demands of tool-making should occur during learning, and (2) variation in learning aptitude would have provided the raw material for any past selection acting on tool-making ability. However, we know very little about the cognitive prerequisites of learning under different information transmission conditions that may have prevailed during the Paleolithic. This paper presents results from an exploratory study to trial new experimental methods for studying the effect of learning conditions and individual differences on Oldowan stone tool skill acquisition. We trained 23 participants for two hours to make stone flakes under two different instructional conditions (observation only vs. direct active teaching). We employed appropriate raw materials, a moderate practice time, and in-person, fully interactive instruction. Participant performance was evaluated through an analysis of the stone artifacts produced. We compared performance across experimental groups with respect to individual participant differences in grip strength, motor accuracy, and cognitive function measured for the study. Our results show that a 2h training window is insufficient to document learning-related performance change. However, direct active teaching reduces variability in knapping rate, methods, and outcomes during early-stage learning, thus increasing the reliability of skill reproduction. Instruction also altered knapping quality vs. quantity trade-offs in the two groups and dramatically changed the effects of individual differences in strength, visuospatial working memory, and social learning tendencies on knapping outcomes. Our results provide further support for the hypothetical co-evolution of teaching, language, and tool-making, and suggest that the presence/absence of direct active teaching can fundamentally alter learning-related selection pressures on individuals. The study provides lessons for future experimental design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stone-tool making is an ancient human skill thought to have played a key role in the bio-cultural co-evolutionary feedback that produced modern brains, culture, and cognition. To test the proposed evolutionary mechanisms underpinning this hypothesis we studied stone-tool making skill learning in modern participants and examined interactions between individual neurostructural differences, plastic accommodation, and culturally transmitted behavior. We found that prior experience with other culturally transmitted craft skills increased both initial stone tool-making performance and subsequent neuroplastic training effects in a frontoparietal white matter pathway associated with action control. These effects were mediated by the effect of experience on pre-training variation in a frontotemporal pathway supporting action semantic representation. Our results show that the acquisition of one technical skill can produce structural brain changes conducive to the discovery and acquisition of additional skills, providing empirical evidence for bio-cultural feedback loops long hypothesized to link learning and adaptive change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stone toolmaking is a human motor skill which provides the earliest archeological evidence motor skill and social learning. Intentionally shaping a stone into a functional tool relies on the interaction of action observation and practice to support motor skill acquisition. The emergence of adaptive and efficient visuomotor processes during motor learning of such a novel motor skill requiring complex semantic understanding, like stone toolmaking, is not understood. Through the examination of eye movements and motor skill, the current study sought to evaluate the changes and relationship in perceptuomotor processes during motor learning and performance over 90 h of training. Participants' gaze and motor performance were assessed before, during and following training. Gaze patterns reveal a transition from initially high gaze variability during initial observation to lower gaze variability after training. Perceptual changes were strongly associated with motor performance improvements suggesting a coupling of perceptual and motor processes during motor learning. In order to evaluate changes and relationships in perceptual process during motor learning and motor performance over training, Bayani et al examine eye movements and motor skill in a paleolithic stone toolmaking task. They demonstrate the importance of understanding the emergence and evolution of perceptual-motor coupling not only in complex motor skill learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human behaviors from toolmaking to language are thought to rely on a uniquely evolved capacity for hierarchical action sequencing. Testing this idea will require objective, generalizable methods for measuring the structural complexity of real-world behavior. Here we present a data-driven approach for extracting action grammars from basic ethograms, exemplified with respect to the evolutionarily relevant behavior of stone toolmaking. We analyzed sequences from the experimental replication of ~ 2.5 Mya Oldowan vs. ~ 0.5 Mya Acheulean tools, finding that, while using the same "alphabet" of elementary actions, Acheulean sequences are quantifiably more complex and Oldowan grammars are a subset of Acheulean grammars. We illustrate the utility of our complexity measures by re-analyzing data from an fMRI study of stone toolmaking to identify brain responses to structural complexity. Beyond specific implications regarding the co-evolution of language and technology, this exercise illustrates the general applicability of our method to investigate naturalistic human behavior and cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been claimed that a unique feature of human culture is that it accumulates beneficial modifications over time. On the basis of a couple of methodological considerations, we here argue that, perhaps surprisingly, there is insufficient evidence for a proper test of this claim. And we indicate what further research would be needed to firmly establish the cumulativeness of human culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The capacity of Homo sapiens for the intergenerational accumulation of complex technologies, practices, and beliefs is central to contemporary accounts of human distinctiveness. However, the actual antiquity and evolutionary origins of cumulative culture are not known. Here we propose and exemplify a research program for studying the origins of cumulative culture using archaeological evidence. Our stepwise approach disentangles assessment of the observed fidelity of behavior reproduction from inferences regarding required learning mechanisms (e.g., teaching, imitation) and the explanation of larger-scale patterns of change. It is empirically grounded in technological analysis of artifact assemblages using well-validated experimental models. We demonstrate with a case study using a toolmaking replication experiment to assess evidence of behavior copying across three 2.6 Ma Oldowan sites from Gona, Ethiopia. Results fail to reveal any effects of raw material size, shape, quality, or reduction intensity that could explain the observed details of intersite technological variation in terms of individual learning across different local conditions. This supports the view that relatively detailed copying of toolmaking methods was already a feature of Oldowan technological reproduction at ca. 2.6 Ma. We conclude with a discussion of prospects and implications for further research on the evolution of human cumulative culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a new road map for research on “How the Brain Got Language” that adopts an EvoDevoSocio perspective and highlights comparative neuroprimatology – the comparative study of brain, behavior and communication in extant monkeys and great apes – as providing a key grounding for hypotheses on the last common ancestor of humans and monkeys (LCA-m) and chimpanzees (LCA-c) and the processes which guided the evolution LCA-m → LCA-c → protohumans → H. sapiens. Such research constrains and is constrained by analysis of the subsequent, primarily cultural, evolution of H. sapiens which yielded cultures involving the rich use of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative approaches to language evolution are essential but cannot by themselves resolve the timing and context of evolutionary events since the last common ancestor with chimpanzees. Archaeology can help to fill this gap, but only if properly integrated with evolutionary theory and the ethnographic, ethological, and experimental analogies required to reconstruct the broader social, behavioral, and neurocognitive implications of ancient artifacts. The current contribution elaborates a technological pedagogy hypothesis of language origins by developing the concept of an evolving human technological niche and applying it to investigate two key transitions posited by Arbib’s Mirror System Hypothesis: (1) from complex action recognition and imitation to proto-language, and (2) from proto-language to language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have learned much about tool use in nonhumans since the discovery of Oldowan stone tools. Despite the ongoing debate over whether tool use in other animals requires cultural transmission, it seems clear that, today, humans show a quantitative, if not qualitative, difference in our ability to transmit information socially through cultural transmission. This ability makes cumulative culture possible. Although comparative studies provide relevant insights, we must look to the Paleolithic archaeological record to address when, where, and ultimately why this shift to high-fidelity social learning occurred. Yet here the frequent assumption that even the earliest stone tools serve as evidence of high-fidelity cultural transmission hinders investigation more than it helps. We pragmatically suggest resetting the null hypothesis for the processes underlying early stone tool production. The null hypothesis that we prefer is that early stone tools might have been so-called latent solutions rather than cultural material that derived from--and depended upon--modern humanlike high-fidelity cultural transmission. This simple shift in perspective prioritizes the systematic investigation of more parsimonious potential explanations and forces us to demonstrate, rather than presume, that stone tools could not have existed without high-fidelity cultural transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Culture suffuses all aspects of human life. It shapes our minds and bodies and has provided a cumulative inheritance of knowledge, skills, institutions, and artifacts that allows us to truly stand on the shoulders of giants. No other species approaches the extent, diversity, and complexity of human culture, but we remain unsure how this came to be. The very uniqueness of human culture is both a puzzle and a problem. It is puzzling as to why more species have not adopted this manifestly beneficial strategy and problematic because the comparative methods of evolutionary biology are ill suited to explain unique events. Here, we develop a more particularistic and mechanistic evolutionary neuroscience approach to cumulative culture, taking into account experimental, developmental, comparative, and archaeological evidence. This approach reconciles currently competing accounts of the origins of human culture and develops the concept of a uniquely human technological niche rooted in a shared primate heritage of visuomotor coordination and dexterous manipulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing reliance on skill-intensive subsistence strategies appears to be a hallmark of human evolution, with wide-ranging implications for sociality, brain size, life-history and cognitive adaptations. These parameters describe a human technological niche reliant on efficient intergenerational reproduction of increasingly complex foraging techniques, including especially the production and effective use of tools. The archaeological record provides a valuable source of evidence for tracing the emergence of this modern human condition, but interpretation of this evidence remains challenging and controversial. Application of methods from psychology and neuroscience to Palaeolithic tool-making experiments offers new avenues for establishing empirical links between technological behaviours, neurocognitive substrates and archaeologically observable material residues. Here we review recent progress and highlight key challenges for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stone tools provide some of the most abundant, continuous, and high resolution evidence of behavioral change over human evolution, but their implications for cognitive evolution have remained unclear. We investigated the neurophysiological demands of stone toolmaking by training modern subjects in known Paleolithic methods (“Oldowan”, “Acheulean”) and collecting structural and functional brain imaging data as they made technical judgments (outcome prediction, strategic appropriateness) about planned actions on partially completed tools. Results show that this task affected neural activity and functional connectivity in dorsal prefrontal cortex, that effect magnitude correlated with the frequency of correct strategic judgments, and that the frequency of correct strategic judgments was predictive of success in Acheulean, but not Oldowan, toolmaking. This corroborates hypothesized cognitive control demands of Acheulean toolmaking, specifically including information monitoring and manipulation functions attributed to the "central executive" of working memory. More broadly, it develops empirical methods for assessing the differential cognitive demands of Paleolithic technologies, and expands the scope of evolutionary hypotheses that can be tested using the available archaeological record. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human faculty for object-mediated action, including tool use and imitation, exceeds that of even our closest primate relatives and is a key foundation of human cognitive and cultural uniqueness. In humans and macaques, observing object-directed grasping actions activates a network of frontal, parietal, and occipitotemporal brain regions, but differences in human and macaque activation suggest that this system has been a focus of selection in the primate lineage. To study the evolution of this system, we performed functional neuroimaging in humans' closest living relatives, chimpanzees. We compare activations during performance of an object-directed manual grasping action, observation of the same action, and observation of a mimed version of the action that consisted of only movements without results. Performance and observation of the same action activated a distributed frontoparietal network similar to that reported in macaques and humans. Like humans and unlike macaques, these regions were also activated by observing movements without results. However, in a direct chimpanzee/human comparison, we also identified unique aspects of human neural responses to observed grasping. Chimpanzee activation showed a prefrontal bias, including significantly more activity in ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, whereas human activation was more evenly distributed across more posterior regions, including significantly more activation in ventral premotor cortex, inferior parietal cortex, and inferotemporal cortex. This indicates a more "bottom-up" representation of observed action in the human brain and suggests that the evolution of tool use, social learning, and cumulative culture may have involved modifications of frontoparietal interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long-standing speculations and more recent hypotheses propose a variety of possible evolutionary connections between language, gesture and tool use. These arguments have received important new support from neuroscientific research on praxis, observational action understanding and vocal language demonstrating substantial functional/anatomical overlap between these behaviours. However, valid reasons for scepticism remain as well as substantial differences in detail between alternative evolutionary hypotheses. Here, we review the current status of alternative 'gestural' and 'technological' hypotheses of language origins, drawing on current evidence of the neural bases of speech and tool use generally, and on recent studies of the neural correlates of Palaeolithic technology specifically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paleolithic stone tools provide concrete evidence of major developments in human behavioural and cognitive evolution. Of particular interest are evolving cognitive mechanisms implied by the cultural transmission of increasingly complex prehistoric technologies, hypothetically including motor resonance, causal reasoning and mentalizing. To test the relevance of these mechanisms to specific Paleolithic technologies, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of Naïve, Trained and Expert subjects observing two toolmaking methods of differing complexity and antiquity: the simple 'Oldowan' method documented by the earliest tools 2.5 million years ago; and the more complex 'Acheulean' method used to produce refined tools 0.5 million years ago. Subjects observed 20-s video clips of an expert demonstrator, followed by behavioural tasks designed to maintain attention. Results show that observational understanding of Acheulean toolmaking involves increased demands for the recognition of abstract technological intentions. Across subject groups, Acheulean compared with Oldowan toolmaking was associated with activation of left anterior intraparietal and inferior frontal sulci, indicating the relevance of resonance mechanisms. Between groups, Naïve subjects relied on bottom-up kinematic simulation in the premotor cortex to reconstruct unfamiliar intentions, and Experts employed a combination of familiarity-based sensorimotor matching in the posterior parietal cortex and top-down mentalizing involving the medial prefrontal cortex. While no specific differences between toolmaking technologies were found for Trained subjects, both produced frontal activation relative to Control, suggesting focused engagement with toolmaking stimuli. These findings support motor resonance hypotheses for the evolutionary origins of human social cognition and cumulative culture, directly linking these hypotheses with archaeologically observable behaviours in prehistory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Early stone tools provide direct evidence of human cognitive and behavioral evolution that is otherwise unavailable. Proper interpretation of these data requires a robust interpretive framework linking archaeological evidence to specific behavioral and cognitive actions. Methodology/Principal Findings: Here we employ a data glove to record manual joint angles in a modern experimental toolmaker (the 4th author) replicating ancient tool forms in order to characterize and compare the manipulative complexity of two major Lower Paleolithic technologies (Oldowan and Acheulean). To this end we used a principled and general measure of behavioral complexity based on the statistics of joint movements. Conclusions/Significance: This allowed us to confirm that previously observed differences in brain activation associated with Oldowan versus Acheulean technologies reflect higher-level behavior organization rather than lower-level differences in manipulative complexity. This conclusion is consistent with a scenario in which the earliest stages of human technological evolution depended on novel perceptual-motor capacities (such as the control of joint stiffness) whereas later developments increasingly relied on enhanced mechanisms for cognitive control. This further suggests possible links between toolmaking and language evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the key challenges confronting cognitive science is to discover natural categories of cognitive function. Of special interest is the unity or diversity of cognitive control mechanisms. Evolutionary history is an underutilized resource that, together with neuropsychological and neuroscientific evidence, can help to provide a biological ground for the fractionation of cognitive control. Comparative evidence indicates that primate brain evolution has produced dissociable mechanisms for external action control and internal self-regulation, but that most real-world behaviors rely on a combination of these. The archeological record further indicates the timing and context of distinctively human elaborations to these cognitive control functions, including the gradual emergence of increasingly complex hierarchical action control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the tool-use and tool-making in human evolutionary which links bipedalism, dexterous hands, articulate language, culture, and a large brain. It mentions that the earliest direct evidence of hominid technological activity and social interaction comes from stone tools and cut-marked bones as much as 2.6 million years ago was at Gona, Ethiopia. It notes that coincidence of two of the most striking trends in human evolution suggests a relationship. An overview of the discussion which explains the significance of took-making to human evolution is offered.

The article reports on the Palaeolithic research at the Institute of Archaeology. The Institute has been an important center of research on Pleistocene environments and Palaeolithic archaeology since its foundation in 1937. The Institute's staff outline their research on archaeology of human evolution, human dispersals in Europe, adaptations to past environments in the Iberian Peninsula, and subsistence changes since the most recent glacial epoch.

Stone tools represent some of the best remaining evidence of pre-historic behavior and cognition. Interpreting this evidence properly requires models based on observable phenomena in the modern world. For this reason, ethnographic research was undertaken among the adze makers of the village of Langda in Indonesian Irian Jaya. This research, involving observation, interviews, and analysis of lithic products, revealed a technology of great sophis-tication and complexity. Adze-making skill is acquired through a period of apprenticeship that may last five years or more, during which time the community of adze makers provides a social scaffold for the learning process. Adze production is itself a so-cial phenomenon, defined as much by personal and group rela-tions, social norms, and mythic significance as by specific reduc-tion strategies and technical terminology. Adze-making ability is associated not only with well-developed perceptual-motor and cognitive skills but also with a wealth of technological knowl-edge. Although much of the complexity of the Langda adze in-dustry would be invisible to an archaeologist, evidence of knap-ping skill is preserved in attributes of the durable stone artifacts produced. This evidence may be used to develop productive hy-potheses about the psychological implications of prehistoric stone tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deals with the implications of skill acquisition on stone toolmaking for cognitive archaeology. Role of perceptual-motor skill in toolmaking; Challenge of learning elementary percussive action in stone toolmaking; Keys to the development of skilled tool use.

Comments on a study on brain evolution. Principle components of brain-size variation in primates; Information on seeking adaptive specialization in smaller scale variation; How global brain size change reflect adaptation.